Cureusnow.com Reviews

Cureus Now - A Review of the Low-Cost Medical Journal Cureus

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Retractions

The Cureus journal is a low-cost scientific forum for physicians in less developed countries. Sadly, it is also a platform for bogus peer reviews, lax ethics and authorship verification procedures and fraudulent research. As a result, Cureus has retracted at least 15 of its articles. Some of the retractions have been a little more complicated than others.

One of the more interesting retractions involved a Pakistani researcher named Rahil Barkat. In addition to stealing data from two Cureus publications, Barkat had already lost his job. He has since been banned from the organization. While his name appears on some of the retractions, the biggest blow to his career came when the Cureus board of directors retracted another study of his involving his research team. He was alleged to have been the mastermind behind the other, less spectacular, retractions.

In addition to his firing, Barkat has been accused of charging $300 for an article he didn't write and for proofreading another. He has also been linked to at least 15 bogus papers.

Cost of articles

The cost of articles at Cureus is relatively inexpensive, on average about $200. However, the editorial staff at Cureus are a long way from the actual authors, and are therefore not the most likely to be able to spot the telltale signs of a dubious article. The company has retracted 15 papers based on accusations of plagiarism and data theft. They have also banned several researchers, including one doctor who charged co-authors to join their manuscripts. But it's not just the costs that are a mystery. The retracted articles were riddled with errors and omissions, ranging from fabricated data to missing references, and even fraudulent figures. If these allegations are true, the company may be guilty of misconduct on a scale with which it is unlikely to be comfortable.

As with many of the other major scientific conferences, Cureus does not have the manpower to police the honesty of its authors. That means that the editorial staff cannot vouch for the accuracy of its claims. The same holds true for the quality of its content.

Peer review

The Peer Review of Cureus has been in the news lately due to a researcher, Rahil Barkat, who has been accused of authoring fraudulent data and stealing other authors' work. Several articles on the site have been retracted due to the misuse of their data and the lack of institutional approval for the study. Many of these studies were single-centered, and people from all over the world were included in them. While the Editorial Board of Cureus may not be able to police honesty, the institution itself must enforce ethical behavior.

In response to allegations, Rahil Barkat has been permanently banned from publishing in Cureus. He has also been fired from his institution, Indus Hospital, in Karachi. The editorial team of Cureus is only located about 10,000 miles away, and is unable to do a thorough search of their authors' backgrounds. The company has a lax set of protocols to verify the validity of authors and institutional affiliations.

Ethics

The Cureus journal provides an affordable, credible scientific forum for physicians from less developed countries. However, it has recently come to light that one researcher from Pakistan is committing data theft, fraudulently submitting articles and purchasing authorships. He has been fired from his institution and permanently banned from publishing in Cureus. As a result, he is credited with at least 15 retracted papers. The editorial team of the journal is 10,000 miles away, and it is unable to police its authors' ethics.

The Cureus editors retracted the paper because they found no evidence that the data came from a validated IRB. They also concluded that the researcher charged his co-authors to be included in the article. These co-authors received payment disguised as "editing fees." This is a problem, because proofreading is insufficient to warrant authorship.